


Holding On (and letting go)

by HematiteBadger



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Pining, one-sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-24
Updated: 2016-08-24
Packaged: 2018-08-10 18:40:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7856704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HematiteBadger/pseuds/HematiteBadger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You have told yourself so many times that, when the time comes, you will be able to let Eiffel go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holding On (and letting go)

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for roomfullofdaisies for Secret Santa Summer Hell 2016.

You have told yourself so many times that, when the time comes, you will be able to let Eiffel go. That the strange affection that you have developed for him, borne of familiarity, will not hold you back from seeing your work through to the end, documenting the progression of the virus until it destroys him. You will witness his death without bias, without grief. There will be sorrow, of course, for the time lost and the failure of yet another human trial, but for the man himself you will waste no time in mourning. He is nothing but a test subject, dredged up from the lowest of the low; dying in the service of science is the greatest contribution he could possibly make to humanity. He does not _matter_ , not to you and not to the rest of the world. It will be inconsequential to lose him.

It is a good and useful thing to tell yourself, even after you stop believing it.

At first you tell yourself that the fear of losing him stems from the fear that it will not happen on your timetable, that Eiffel will get himself killed in some improbable accident and destroy all your hard work. He is rash and foolish enough that this is a real risk; for someone so afraid of nearly everything he seems to have a rare talent for placing himself in life-threatening peril. There is always some fire to be put out around him, sometimes literally, and for a while you learned to be grateful even for Minkowski’s self-important meddling because she was better than you have ever been at protecting him from himself. It was not until you _saved_ his life, defying a direct order to eliminate all witnesses to a potential first-contact scenario, that you truly began to understand what it was that you feared losing.

Your work has made you a master of deception. You are _gifted_ at earning a grudging trust from those around you, despite your (often deliberately) off-putting nature. And you are more than familiar with how angry it makes people to realize that trust was misplaced. It has never bothered you; it is not your fault that your colleagues are so quick to assume you are a friend to them and their cause. Their shock, their rage, their pain, none of it is your concern. But when Eiffel discovers that he is nothing but a test subject, sent to you to be used and discarded like so many before him, you can see him crumbling before your eyes. For the first time in a very long time, you truly feel that you have betrayed someone. The feeling is jarring enough that it nearly breaks you all on its own, tearing its way into the core of your being and exposing raw nerves you had long since assumed were dead. This is a _person_ in front of you, a person who has somehow managed to matter to you more than anyone has in a very long time. You have not just lost a test subject by being discovered. You have not just lost work, or time, or important data that could have led to a breakthrough. You have lost _him_.

You are successful in burying this revelation for a while. It is not difficult; you _are_ still angry that your work has been compromised. And even after one of the Hephaestus’ ghosts comes back to haunt its corridors and turns you into the enemy of your current crew’s enemy, nobody is eager to interact with you more than is absolutely necessary. When Eiffel is _forced_ to interact with you, work alongside you, the two of you completely failing to pull together towards a common goal... well, whatever feelings you may be developing for him do not stop you from finding him _immensely_ irritating much of the time. It is distraction enough to keep you from caring for him, even as you try to regain his trust via some misguided appeal to logic.

You should have known better than that. You have grown familiar enough with Eiffel’s irrational nature that you are beginning to see the charm in it; you should have known that trying to get him to see the objective value of your work and his place in it was doomed from the start. He is a man ruled by his emotions, and it is beyond your capacity to reach him on that level. At least, that is what you assumed.

It is not until he angers you into losing you own logical composure, into revealing some sliver of that which has driven you for your entire life, that he begins to come around. It is a triumph, but a terrifying one as you realize that he’s agreeing to continue being part of the testing not because he sees its value, but because it matters so deeply to _you_.

You are unaccustomed to caring about people. You are even _more_ unaccustomed to being cared _about_.

And still you tell yourself that you will be able to let him go. You tell yourself this even as you fight desperately to save his life, drenching your hands in his blood, roaring internally that the time has not yet come and your work is not yet finished. You repeat it to yourself as you realize there is nothing you can do and you no longer have any _choice_ but to let him go, and your self-certainty fades along with his pulse. You work feverishly to keep what little blood is left in Eiffel’s body circulating, as if by sheer force of will you can prevent the universe from taking away another person you love.

_Love_. An old and forgotten emotion, recognized only too late. Your own bitter laughter echoes in your head, threatening to escape until you turn it into a harsh growl of frustration. Of _course_ you did not see it sooner. What reason would you ever have to suspect that something so long absent from your life might return? And yet, with all the other tumult Eiffel has brought you, what right do you have to be surprised by anything churned up in his wake?

You hold onto him, gripping his slack and blood-smeared hand in yours as you read his vital signs for some opening, some new sliver of opportunity. You plead silently with a power you do not believe exists, asking for compassion for him, asking for help, asking for _more time_. You ask for a miracle, and a miracle comes.

You should know better than to squander a miracle. But you know better than to assume a miracle is for your benefit. When Eiffel’s eyes open and his thin, weak smile seems brighter than any solar flare, you do not reach for his hand again. You do not tell him how badly he has broken you, that he has become a weakness you would welcome. The wary compassion he seems to feel for you, all that allows him to tolerate your work and your very presence, is too tenuous to risk. You can only hope to keep him by forcing yourself not to ask for more than he has already given. You keep your silence, and keep your distance as much as you are able, delaying the moment when you know you will eventually lose him.

It will happen sooner or later, you keep reminding yourself. Progress or no, it is too much to hope that _this_ will be the test that works. You will do everything in your power to prolong his life, but you know that eventually the virus will kill him as it has every other subject before him. You have spent so much time sneering at your commanders for their angry obstinacy in the face of the inevitable, their refusal to believe something simply because they do not _want_ it to be true, but now you are beginning to understand the feeling. However certainly you know that Eiffel is on borrowed time, you will not allow yourself to believe it. It is a silent war inside your head, refusal to allow delusion battling with refusal to admit defeat, the fighting brought to a draw with the explosion that ends Eiffel’s life.

You should, in theory, take his loss better than the others do, considering how long you’ve been bracing yourself for it. But the blow comes at you from an unexpected side, knocking you down just as surely as it does them. Even if you could have accepted Eiffel’s death – a fact of which you grow increasingly doubtful – the circumstances are so far removed from what you had anticipated that you cannot reconcile it now. He deserved a death that would have _meant_ something, would have at least served a higher scientific cause. He deserved better than a pointless accident. He deserved better than dying _alone_. Even at the last, when you could no longer have saved him, you would have at least held his hand.

The station falls apart around you, and all of you fall apart within it. Lovelace withdraws into bitterness, guilt and physical pain rendering her intractable. Minkowski’s dictatorial tendencies come back to the fore, overcompensation for her renewed fear of inadequacy. Hera... it becomes harder to dismiss Hera as ‘not an actual person’ when you witness the depth and breadth of her grief, which buffets the station more than any external force.

For your part, you are accustomed to working through shock and loss and pain, pushing all distractions aside to focus on the task at hand, which in this case is simply _surviving_. You spend your days calmly and methodically working yourself to exhaustion, and your nights nursing a cold and hollow ache in your chest until fitful sleep claims you. You start to see ghosts again, the ones that haunt you at the start of every mission before the new memories overwrite the old. A flash of movement at the end of a long corridor, Lambert’s unmistakably jerky gesturing. The tuneless whistling of Commander Avery, Lovelace’s predecessor, echoing through the vents. A distant sarcastic drawl, too faint to make out but clearly Eiffel’s voice, followed by Fourier’s laugh. Old ghosts mix with the new, and in an uncharacteristically poetic moment you wonder if the rest of you are just waiting to join them.

You think perhaps that this is what is happening when Eiffel is returned to you. Were you inclined enough towards fanciful thinking to imagine that another miracle might occur, you probably would have envisioned a heartfelt reunion. A rush of relief, a clasping of hands, perhaps even the utterance of words so carefully left unsaid this far. But this is a reunion with an almost literal ghost, a broken shell of the man you mourned for so long, and the mix of pain and joy the sight of him inspires in you is overshadowed by the dread that comes with his new companions. Seeing Warren Kepler, one of the curators of your personal hell, sling a possessive arm around those now-frail shoulders, you cannot help thinking that it might have been better for all of you had Eiffel simply died.

The sentiment does not fade. Kepler’s hold on the station and on Eiffel himself grows, and you feel everyone on the station sinking into a void more dangerous than the vacuum outside. You are all being pulled away from each other when you can least afford it, and you feel powerless to fight against it. The pain that Eiffel’s apparent death left you with has not abated, it has merely changed forms. Even the tentative realization that Decima may be _working_ does not allay your worries; you cannot imagine handing it and Eiffel over to Goddard Futuristics, especially not in the care of this man. You know all too well what he will do to your work, to Eiffel, to _you_. And so you keep your silence, through questioning and harassment, and eventually through physical torture.

You keep your silence when he asks Eiffel to renew his permission for your continued experimentation.

It is an impossible choice. Speak, and see your work and its subject fall under Kepler’s direct scrutiny, whatever he decides that entails, your delicate research destroyed by careless or malicious hands, your weakness towards Eiffel discovered and exploited. Remain silent, and lose your work entirely, along with Eiffel’s faith and Eiffel himself.

There is no choice. You love Eiffel, more than you thought you could ever love someone. But you fear Kepler more. You cannot even bring yourself to feel betrayed when Eiffel rejects you, giving Kepler an excuse to take away everything that has ever mattered in your life.

You have told yourself so many times that, when the time comes, you will be able to let Eiffel go. You managed to believe it for a while. But now that you know you are truly losing him, not to a failed experiment or an unforeseeable accident but to the manipulation of a man who holds your life in his hands, you are aware of just how much you were deluding yourself. You can lose him, of course – you have no choice but to lose him – but the loss will stay with you, burning itself into you, truly killing that part of you that you thought was dead before you met him.

And so you delay the inevitable last moment, stretching out the neutralization of the virus as far as you can without drawing Kepler’s ire. At every moment, with every injection, you silently pray that Eiffel will recant, that he will have faith in you and find the courage to speak out where you cannot. You ask for another miracle, and know that this time it will not come. In between cycles, as each round of neutralizing agents works its way through Eiffel’s system, you let your hand come to rest on his, fingertips pressed to his wrist. Monitoring his pulse is a vital part of the process, and if he doubts the need for you to do it manually when he is hooked up to so many machines that are taking his vitals with more accuracy than you ever could he remains silent about it.

Even at the last, when you can no longer save him, you will at least hold his hand.


End file.
